I first became aware of its reality while looking for a taxi, and the first thought I had then was how much had Karen known when I’d met her at the Ace, and why wasn’t I told about it. I was on my way home from an early dinner with Immo; hearing of Terry again had put me in mind of him, the other devil I knew, who was also the one non-art-related friend who remained in my life, now that Vanilla and company were out of the picture. Every couple of months, Immo and I sought joint reprieve from the desolation of our respective social circles. My choices, of course, were always curious to him. That was obvious from the long, patient stare he would give me once we’d taken our seats in his very nice apartment downtown, or at a restaurant or bar, and my story finally came out. But what about him, since we’d graduated high school? That tale was a lot stranger, he’d once agreed with a stifled chuckle: his staying the course to becoming a physician, briefly a shared goal of ours, long ago, before I was capable of formulating my own and merely parroted my father’s hopes for me. In truth Immo was no less of a seeker than I or any other artist I knew, but he’d decided his profession wasn’t going to reflect this. There was a certain standard of acceptable conduct coming down from his father that imposed limits on his future, limits I never felt for my own. (I did feel limits, of course, just not those ones.) So, as he was expected to, he’d gone into a respected and well-remunerated profession, and practiced it at an august place (Langone). He’d also recently gotten engaged to a woman he’d met in his boarding-school years, Vera, the kind of woman Claire and Karen might have become had they not pulled against the natural flow of their lives. I’d met Vera but once, and Immo didn’t seem keen on our getting too close. I knew he was right about this; we would have loathed each other. Immo had hardly left behind the transgressive leanings inspired by the antics of a young Gerry Finella, a man whom he continued to call a friend and inspiration, though I find it difficult to tell when a Scandinavian is joking. That he still kept company with me, a denizen of the filthy Bronx, swarming with homeless, was just further proof of his refusal to be the son his father would have liked him to be.
Yet he went much further than this, much further than he should have. He introduced disrepute and some amount of joy into his otherwise aboveboard career by, well, fornicating with his patients. Nothing that wasn’t consensual, of course. There was, he said, no special intimacy between a patient and an ear, nose, and throat specialist. It wasn’t like being someone’s gynecologist or psychiatrist. The closest contact he had with them, in the examination room, would be while taking a throat swab, when he would sometimes thrust his fingers into the patient’s mouth and collect cells from hidden places. He enjoyed this feeling of filling their mouths. If the patient was attractive enough, it had a sexual aspect; if she wasn’t, it was more contemptuous, and he thought of asphyxiation, punishment for her plainness. He liked, in either case, to roam around in there until she gagged.
I knew, of course, that whatever field he went into, his impulse to color outside the lines would have found expression: corruption and kickbacks, had he been a businessman; ambulance-chasing and tax evasion, had he been a lawyer; and improper relations with students, had he been a professor. The thought brought me a certain peace, and walking with Immo, this marauding Viking, after eating on Hudson Street that day, looking for a cab home, I’d felt even more revivified than by Garrett’s concoction.
It was then that it happened, standing in the street, holding out my arm, searching the taxis as they shot by, establishing imaginary eye contact with drivers through the windows’ opaque glare, hoping something in my gaze might compel them to pull over, even though their lights were off. This was false hope, perpetually renewed by each wave of darkened yellow cabs that came through with the changing of the signals. Chilly and storming, middlingly so, the air was just on the point of putting a mild, not unpleasant sting into the skin, in the way of bedroom slaps, the kind that warm you. The clouds had grown all day into big silver puffs, low and pressing down upon us. Beads of rain collected on the nap of Immo’s plush camel coat; he swiped at it at one point with a gloved hand, inducing a watery cascade.
A fresh cluster of taxis streamed by, and then, suddenly, there it was: The one who didn’t get away, right on the rooftop billboard of the taxi passing nearest us. It didn’t register with me immediately, though. As Immo briefed me on his latest fling, this one with a fellow doctor, not a patient, my gaze slid onto the side of a bus bedecked with a geriatric Schwarzenegger, who featured in an ad for, I gathered, some sort of a reality show. Only then did it occur to me what I’d seen a moment ago, or thought I had. More taxis approached in the distance, yet I found myself dropping my hand and retreating onto the curb. Immo, who was looking to put me in a car, stepped back out of the street, too. He stood beside me, perplexed, as six or seven more cabs rolled by. This time, two of them had their lights on. My ride was here. Yet I stayed planted on the curb, my arm frozen by my side. I wasn’t looking for a ride anymore, nor the wares these particular cabs hawked. Not Shia LaBeouf’s return as a grizzled, middle-aged veteran of the interminable machine wars in the latest Transformers iteration; not the unsung divas of an apparently indestructible show, The Voice; not a new Netflix series that seemed to be chattered about all over network television, Vicarious; and not a dated, paint-by-numbers comedy for which I couldn’t make out the title, only Kevin James’ squirrel-toothed countenance. My skin goose-bumped from the cold when, a moment later, a lone cab drifted by with no images, just another flash from memory: FALLING SPIRITS. Hadn’t I seen this one, too, in Karen’s book of proverbs, epigrams, and koans, one I hadn’t thought worth speaking aloud or lingering over? Evidently someone must have thought well of it. I felt a flush of heat pass through me despite the damp. They’d made decisions without me. The argument, I could already see Paul making it to Garrett, was that these lines weren’t going to be placed near my pictures, so what misgivings could I really have? But, I knew, these were just the first few drops of a storm of advertising no-one in the city knew was coming. Eventually, people wouldn’t be able to ignore the links between my images and these texts, when they’d both grown ubiquitous. I knew I needed to find Garrett as soon as I could. Yet if he put his foot down, what were my options, really? Beseeching Karen not to supply any more stupidities like this one for Paul to use against me? That could have its own costs. Simply refusing to illustrate any of these taglines ex post facto? Wasn’t that my deepest worry, being forced into that? That this independent textual campaign wouldn’t truly remain independent, that there might be a want, say, for something as crass as a drawing of a whiskey pour because of this line, FALLING SPIRITS? That wasn’t the kind of collaboration I’d had in mind when I’d proposed the idea to Karen. But would I be able to fight off such constellations and loop-closing without being ejected from the project and having my images taken down? I’d been given no real guarantees except that the art remained under my copyright.
Quickly I realized I’d have to make my peace with some associations between image and text as the campaign swept through the city; in which case, I’d rather have a say in which phrases Antral would be letting loose in town. I’d have to demand as much. But for now: FALLING SPIRITS, crawling by. At least it was presented acceptably. Slate gray background, a deep black typeface—something transitional—and all capitals, without the contamination of that entirely different alphabet they kept in the lower case. Offsetting the nugatory semantic component of the sign, there were pleasing visual rhythms here. And one thing we had discussed as a group, an idea suggested by Karen, of not using a unified typeface across the text, was being respected, at least in the two instances I’d seen today. Branding was a spent force, she’d said. Companies weren’t people, products weren’t people, people weren’t even people. None of them had or needed a calling card. So we’d agreed on a song without a refrain.
I said some hurried goodbyes to Immo. He grabbed me by the back of the neck, leaned in and pressed his cheek against mine in the way he’d been doing since he was a boy just arrived in the States from Oslo, though now with added gravitas. I sensed he knew something was wrong but that now wasn’t the time to talk about it. He had problems of just the same kind. I got in the next cab I found, and, as we speeded along, we passed one of what I would come to think of as our cabs; this would soon extend to our bus shelters, our buildings, our subway stops, our trains (the E and C lines). Hurt yourself, but only if you want to. Here was one I hadn’t noticed in the book. It might have been a redacted entry, one that Paul had gotten Karen to cough up in the meeting they would have had without me. Although it incensed me, it also intrigued me, the business relationship between the two of them to which I was not wholly privy. I was impressed, frankly, they’d gotten a taxi to carry this one. That’s where we were, societally. Even this headline seemed like a possible enticement, perhaps to some submarket of cutters. So long as it was, it was advertising.
My eyes kept searching on the drive home, through a blurred windshield that turned crystal every two seconds, with each slash of the wipers, before blurring again in the waters that fell heavily now. I hoped Immo had gotten himself out of the rain; I could picture his jacket and hair sopping wet, and him detained on his phone in the street, making excuses to Vera. Everything I saw or imagined only served to stir my anger and fear about the nature of this campaign. I sent off a fuck you to Karen by text, exactly what she deserved. Back came the disingenuous ???, and then, when I’d not responded, the call, which I didn’t answer. Can you talk? she wrote. Well, I could. But she shouldn’t sleep well tonight, and only silence from me could ensure that. Garrett was the one I actually needed on the line. Why put things off? I wouldn’t be able to finish those drawings otherwise.
As soon as I stepped in my apartment door, I was pouring Lagavulin, a birthday gift from Ty I’d not touched. I splashed it down, felt the smoke in my throat, and poured another to drink more thoughtfully. I’d more or less given up spirits until being drawn back to them by the wheat whiskey. Sometimes, I had to admit, drinking fine liquor seemed no worthier a placation than television, which I’d reduced almost entirely to football coverage by expensing a cable NFL Pass, so that I could see any and every game. All the same, the scotch had settled me, and with that I made my call. Garrett—I should have known this—was ready and waiting.
“I don’t get it,” I began. A long pause ensued.
“We just had to get something up quick, and Paul—”
“Paul what?”
“Well, he thought it might be best not to distract you from the job at hand, finishing those pictures. We need them real soon. And the reason—”
“As if there wasn’t time for me to weigh in on which lines.” My tone was sharper than I’d ever allowed it to become with him. I’d not planned on it, but it felt utterly right, coming from my burning throat.
“You can weigh in on the rest of them, how about that?”
“How many are there, already floating around?”
“Five, six, nothing much. The reason—”
“What else are you going to do like this?”
“Like what?
“Behind my back.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t put it that way. The reason I okayed this, just this time, is simple. And I think you know what it is. These ones don’t venture anywhere near your pictures. They’re Karen’s babies. And speed, total speed, was the point. I couldn’t get into a debate with you, because if I’d asked, I would have had to listen to you, because I respect you. It was more practical this way. You should realize that.”
“Did you tell her not to tell me about this?”
“It had nothing to do with deception.”
“Did you?”
“Our contract is with Cosquer, you understand that, right? If what we were doing was so untoward—and I resent that, there’s nothing to it. I don’t practice deception. There are principles in this world.”
“But which principles? If this is what they are, what they allow, what’s the point?”
“Karen could have told you, if there was really something wrong here. She didn’t see a problem either.”
“But did you discourage her in some way?”
“Unless she had some strong objection, we thought you shouldn’t be troubled right now. But like I said, for the next round, and all the ones after, you’ll be in the loop, whether your drawings are involved or not, if that’s what you want. Okay? They’re the key to this thing—you know that’s how I feel. I’m the one who has to ram these things down Paul’s throat for you. No-one’ll touch your pictures, I can promise you that.”
The next morning my phone held a string of text and voicemails from Karen. I felt a dreamy pleasure at this, knowing my idea of sleeping on it, leaving things alone, had been sound. I’d stoked her night with worry. The messages had come in every few hours, from someone who normally slept quite regimented hours: proof that even the healthy dose of Klonopin she’d grown accustomed couldn’t quash her fears. Every vibration of the phone on my bedsheets during the night had been a confirmation of victory, no matter that I only felt it in my dreams. I could see now I’d even extracted an apology: They wanted to go ahead with a handful and they insisted I not ‘disturb’ you, 2:15 am. I didn’t want to lose the account over it, 3:05 am. And then this morning, just beyond 5:00 am: I am sorry.
Looking at this little odyssey of grief and guilt that had played out while I’d slept, I lost some of my enthusiasm for a real fight with Karen. Even if she hadn’t spent the night wrestling with her conscience—a tussle so much more poignant than any simple apology could have been, because here on my phone I held a record of the tenuous steps she’d had to take to get there—I still might have let her off lightly. There were extenuating circumstances. I’d not exactly been a good citizen of Cosquer in bedding Daphne, and I’d known, even during the act, that it could make for irreparable difficulties with Garrett. The account might well be lost. How angry could I be, then, especially now that I had Garrett’s assurance that I’d be included in all future decisions? Frankly I was surprised Karen had even gone this far in apologizing.
Still, she shouldn’t have done what she had. Her fear had gotten the better of her, her anger, too, and I wouldn’t forget it. I settled on a punishment: three or four days of solid silence. That felt like enough, considering what I was withholding from her about JG Chemical. Who knew if those activities still went on, but under better cover this time, arming police forces with military gear to shock and awe the citizenry? Rick hadn’t been wrong: Paul and Garrett’s hands weren’t exactly clean.
The two cabs I’d spotted seemed earlier to have mated wildly in the night; by week’s end they’d spread all over the city, though the phrases they each carried were distinct. Garrett was genuinely working fast; that hadn’t been just a pretext to operate without my approval. Perhaps his principles were better and stronger than I’d thought, and the God-fearing routine no put-on. After our exchange on the phone, he sent out to a group list the taglines of Karen’s he liked, giving me the say I’d demanded. But in fact I didn’t find any phrases I wanted to veto. Most I’d already glimpsed in the margins of that notebook of hers. And even if I’d wanted to object... well, there was another reason I grew less angry with her, stemming from an idea first put into my head by Duke: control, choice, having things just your own way, wasn’t everything. Worthy things, even the worthiest, could emerge through coercion, deception, vengeance. Any such happenings might end up in my drawings, if it felt right to me.
Sometimes only a few days would pass after we’d approved an idea—a phrase or a couplet—when I’d be confronted with that same bit of language in the street. Instead of our simply saying these things to others, they were also being said back to us. You would never see the same line twice, though, so it wasn’t possible to speak of slogans as such, only shared tones or shadings between distinct expressions. That was enough continuity for us, and frequently we jettisoned this, too, when it felt necessary. Over the next weeks, Karen’s phrasemaking began to colonize the city, moving from the taxis to the bus shelters to any open wall space, covering friezes, mostly with giant prints, but occasionally with stenciled murals executed under my and John’s supervision. The real work was left to Cosquer’s sign painters, Pete and Shannon, and the hired crews working under them. We weren’t, after all, just a design group but a production company, one of unusually small scale, so that for now, as long as we kept within the city limits, the project was something Karen could manage well enough, assembling crews of freelancers and subcontractors as needed. Our primary source material remained the jottings in Karen’s notebooks, even if what we extracted from them was not quite what she would have liked. We’d send around a scan of a few pages from time to time—Paul’s idea, a good one. I noticed more and more of those blocks of black, covering portions of text that had been exposed when I’d seen the book at the Ace, but that I couldn’t now recall. From what little remained visible in the book, we’d choose the bits we liked best, sometimes taking only a constituent phrase from something longer: Thirteen studies.
The campaign had me wandering the city far more than I was inclined to (I was no flâneur), just to see all our words—her words—unfurl in a fast-growing gyre. The financial outlay must have been enormous. Garrett was even richer than I’d thought. He didn’t carry himself with pretension, of course. He was a modern businessman, an entrepreneur who had no need of a suit. I was never briefed on the exact figures. I thought to ask once or twice but never did. What would they help me understand? This was going to be one of the largest stealth campaigns a metropolis had ever seen. That Silk Cut operation in London, perhaps even the more notable oblique rollouts of recent decades, say, for Radiohead and Beyoncé, might end up seeming quaint when a man like Garrett was willing to invest so heavily and eccentrically. We were literally changing the face of the city, changing its expression, and hence its import, you could say, and none of this change had been thus far directed, even nominally, toward commercial ends. It was like Holzer or Montgomery, but without all the shouting; which is to say, Karen’s first book—it should have been called The Writing on the Wall—was being published by FSG or Dorothy but by New York itself. It would keep urban studies professors busy for years afterward, Paul said the next time I saw him, apparently without irony.
To appraise our early work, the four of us decided to gather in Chelsea and walk up to Times Square. The others were all together when I got there, bunched on the corner, right beneath the High Line. I hadn’t seen them since we’d looked over those initial drafts at the studio; nor had I spoken to any of them in several days now. They all eyed me, each with a slightly different brand of concern, I thought, corresponding to the differences in our relationships. They turned apologetic once I informed them, without being asked, what they were waiting to learn: that in fact the first set of drawings was virtually done. I exchanged a brusque hug with Karen, nothing more. She tried to hang on as I pulled back, but what she got instead from me was a nod so deep it was almost a bow—acknowledgement of the revenge she’d exacted, in keeping the campaign plan from me, for my dalliance with Daphne. I was smiling gently, though. I was, truly, not very angry anymore: not because I’d forgiven her, but because I’d begun to long, in the last few days, for Daphne again. It meant I had a harder time sustaining any of my feelings, including anger, for Karen. Let her take me any way she wanted to.
Today, I was here, we all were, to see the first stage in the project launch. After a few attempts at engaging me, as if what had happened recently hadn’t happened, they mostly kept to themselves, with hopeful chit-chat here and there about the campaign. But my quiet eventually quieted them; the march up Seventh Avenue, which was supposed to be an early victory lap of sorts, and an icebreaker between me and them after this betrayal, turned pensive, almost funereal. Karen was everywhere, though, it was true, scattered across so many surfaces, you could read her in a million ways, on façades and street signs and right in the flow of traffic, too, on buses and the taxis littered with those familiar words from her fraying notebook. The team had done a brilliant job, even if they’d begun it without telling me. We even went down into the subway at one point, where I didn’t much go these days, preferring the Lyfts Garrett was paying for, to see more of Karen’s book splashed about Penn Station, as one might in a venerable and well-trafficked gallery. She should have been thrilled. Maybe she would be, looking back on the occasion. But, for the moment, walking off to one side of me, she seemed stricken, no matter the encouragements and compliments Garrett and Paul sent her way. I’d not yet offered absolution to any of them. Nor would I.
We, of course, were all actively searching for her works, so we were bound to find them. The truer proof of omnipresence came on the taxi home from Times Square, where I took my leave of the group. Karen had lingered near the car door but I’d shooed her away. On the ride home, just beyond noon, my driver spontaneously spoke of these phantom phrases, wondering aloud who was behind it, and what it might mean. I told him I had no idea, and luxuriated, the rest of the way, in the certainty that we were changing things, tying the city together with words and soon with pictures, however estranged we may have been from each other.